I wouldn’t be surprised if, fifteen or twenty years from now, when the dust has long settled in Syria, the names of the dead have been forgotten by the entire world except the people still alive who knew them personally, and Russia has once again become a “newly emergent” democracy with a free press and free elections, an enterprising middle-aged Russian scholar sat down to write the history of our darker, troubled times and, if only in a longish footnote, made the patently false claim that most Russians had been vehemently opposed to the deposed dictator Putin’s barbarous bombings in Syria, and there even had been a broad-based albeit mostly low-key anti-war movement in Russia at the time. TRR